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A skeptic finds heaven, meets with more skeptics BY TRACEY O'SHAUGHNESSY | REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

Have we got proof of heaven? Eben Alexander says we have. His book "Proof of Heaven" is his dissertation on the afterlife, an absorbing, provocative story of this neurosurgeon's 2008 battle with bacterial meningitis. The near-fatal bout left Alexander in a coma for seven days. It also, he insists, plunged him into a viscous, sooty netherworld of blood-red roots where he was led by "a beautiful girl with high cheekbones and deep blue eyes" into a luminous chamber of limitless love.

A delusion? A fantasy? The assuaging arrangement of neurons faced with the possibility of their own extinction? No, asserts Alexander, it was heaven.

None of this, of course, is new. Reports of near-death experiences are so common that those who experience them now have their own foundation, the Near Death Experience Research Foundation. Even Gallup has investigated. Their poll indicates that about 5 percent of Americans have near-death experiences.

A 1997 U.S. News & World Report's poll estimated that up to 15 million Americans might have had a near-death experience. Hallmarks of the experience — the dark tunnel, the distant light, the overpowering sense of peace — have become so common as to seem clichéd.

What makes Alexander's experience different, of course, is that he is a man of science. An academic neurosurgeon for 25 years, Alexander spent 15 years at the Brigham & Women's and Children's Hospitals and Harvard Medical School in Boston. Although a nominal Episcopalian for most of his early life, he had become a dedicated skeptic who had heard about "miraculous" turnarounds and near-death experiences, which he brusquely dismissed.

He is, in other words, no fuzzy-headed fantasist.

Perhaps for that reason, "Proof of Heaven" shot immediately to the top of The New York Times' paperback best seller list, where it has remained. But in an interview with the Times, Alexander, 58, insisted that his book was not intended for believers, but for skeptics, like himself, who are inclined to reduce all human experience to science and save little room for the divine.

Unsurprisingly, the book has inspired spirited rebukes, including dismissal of Alexander's assertion that his "entire neo-cortex was shut down." In the Huffington Post, Amitai Shenhav advanced the popular medical explanation that Alexander's pre-existing faith bias predisposed him for an experience of this sort. Atheist crusader Sam Harris dismissed Alexander's book the ch value\=\"226 128 147\"/=

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sort of "archaeological artifact that is certain to embarrass us in the eyes of future generations."

Gallup reports that 92 percent of Americans say they believe in God and 82 percent say they believe in heaven. These numbers have held steady over the past 60 years even as affiliation with religious institutions has declined.

Whatever discomfort or spiritual laziness keeps us out of the pews has not quelled the yearning to believe that there is something grander than all of us and a place more divine than what we've got. Call that evolutionary adaptation or religious conviction, but it is inescapable.

For a person of faith, like myself, a book like "Proof of Heaven" can feel gratuitous to the point of redundancy. It has never been critical for me to verify my religious convictions.

Faith exists in a sphere of conviction uncontaminated by reason's urgent demands. It seems almost impertinent to demand evidence of a faith so marrow-deep. Isn't that, after all, what separates faith from science?

Reinhold Niebuhr wisely suggested that Christians should be wary of claiming "any knowledge of either the furniture of heaven or the temperature of hell."

And yet Scripture is filled with skeptics looking for a reason to believe, doubters who hold back until they have put their hands in wounds, restless searchers looking for a miracle to verify what they can only suppose.

We all need a little infusion now and then, some reassurance that we are not deluding ourselves, that something like this notion we've been coasting on resembles truth.

That such encouragement should come from such an unlikely source is affirming, given the increasingly polarizing divisions between atheists and believers. But is it game-changing? Not for believers. We're a resolute lot.

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Travel

Rosana Faessler stops by the hostess stand to check on reservations, then makes her way into the dining room to chat with a couple of the regular guests. After a few minutes, she wanders to the breakfast buffet to make sure everything's clean and full, then straightens a picture before heading back out to the dining room.